Sandhya Suri on ‘Santosh’: 'The film doesn't point and shout very much'

livemint.com:

Santosh, which premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, takes neither of those paths.Instead, the British-Indian filmmaker is telling a story far murkier and more ambiguous. The film follows Santosh Saini, a newly widowed woman who is offered her late husband’s police constable position “on compassionate grounds," as part of a government scheme. Suri was drawn to telling the story of a female cop after she saw a photograph taken during nationwide protests in 2012 following the Nirbhaya case.

The photo captured a group of female protesters faced by a line of female police officers. “There was one policewoman who had such an interesting expression on her face," said Suri in an interview at Cannes. “I was hooked.

I was like oh my god, look at these women for whom it's not even safe to walk the streets, and their sense of powerlessness, but look at her power. She's them but she’s also not them."Unpacking that curious mix of power and powerlessness that exists for a woman with any kind of status or privilege in India became the entry point to the script, which Suri first workshopped during a Sundance Screenwriters Lab in 2016. Key to building a realistic story about modern day India was bringing in layers of casteism, misogyny and religious intolerance, all of which help establish the sociopolitical context of the fictional North Indian state of Chirag Pradesh where the film is set.